Niceville

he was very glad to have heard from Charlie because he, Coker, had a pretty young Indian woman named Twyla Littlebasket lying on the leather sofa in his living room and sobbing great racking tear-loaded sobs into the cushions in a way that would very likely be the ruin of them—meaning the cushions.
    “My place or yours?” asked Danziger, when Coker had brought his narrative to a natural pause.
    “My place,” said Coker. “You may recall I still got the proceeds here.”
    “Shit. Holy shit. Twyla see it?”
    “Yep.”
    “How the fuck how?”
    “She has a key. She was here when I got home.”
    “It was still on the fucking
counter
?”
    “You left after I did, Charlie.”
    “Shit. I never thought.”
    “You’re slipping, son.”
    “Is that why Twyla’s crying?”
    “Nope. She’s got more important shit to deal with than what’s sitting on my kitchen counter.”
    “Like what?”
    “That you got to see to believe. You hear from Deitz yet?”
    “Didn’t I say I was spending the rest of the afternoon fucking with Deitz’s head?”
    Charlie, already up and looking for his gun and his jacket and his boots, pulled the pay-as-you-go cell out of his hip pocket. There was a text message, badly spelled, as if the guy doing the texting had really large thumbs.
    OK HOW M UCH WEAR WHEN
GOT 2 B 2 NITE GOT 2 B
NO TRI X M OTH RFCKERS
    “I guess it slipped my mind, Charlie. You may recall I was kinda busy not shooting a Barricaded EDP. This what you did after you left us at the church?”
    “My labors never cease my wonders to perform.”
    “Yeah yeah. Is it really from Deitz?”
    Danziger looked at the text message again.
    “Well, the guy can’t spell
motherfuckers
.”
    “That’s Deitz.”

Merle Walks the Town
    On the way back down Gwinnett, Merle passed the same appliance store where the crowd had been watching some sort of police standoff at a church on Peachtree. The television sets were all showing the same loop, a small chubby man in a green work shirt and matching pants, cuffed and bleeding, being duck-walked along the sidewalk by an impressive-looking redheaded female cop who was grinning hugely and talking to a tall silver-haired man in a charcoal suit, who was leaning back on the patrol car with his arms folded across his chest.
    The man in the suit was Coker, Merle realized with a jolt, and, some distance away, looking on with a big grin, was Charlie Danziger, with a group of uniform cops, smoking a cigarette and looking right at home.
    Merle stood and took that in for a time and was surprised to find that, in some strange way, and by no means all at once, he had gradually ceased to give a rat’s ass about what those two were doing there. It was as if they were part of another life, an old life that he used to have, and they had ceased to have any meaning in his new one.
    Maybe for now, he decided, he would side with Glynis, because he needed a place to stay, and she was a damn good-looking woman, and there was still the matter of Coker and Danziger to be handled.
    He took a long last look at Coker and Danziger on the television screens, both of them smiling and talking with the cops, looking pleased as punch with themselves, and he locked them away in his heart under
unfinished business
.
    Down the street he plucked some peaches off a rack outside a grocerystore, tossed a five-dollar bill onto the pile without stopping, and strolled around Niceville with as easy a heart as he had managed to have since before he got sent to Angola.
    Later that evening, as the dark was coming on, he rested his bones on a park bench in the shadows of the town square, lit up a cigarette, and sat there watching the people of Niceville come and go.
    Around ten the man from the Blue Bird, the sad guy in the seat beside him, came and sat down beside him again. Merle offered him a cigarette, which, after some thought, the man accepted without a word, and they both went back to watching the strolling citizens in an odd but companionable silence. By ten thirty the park was full of silent figures gathered under the trees. Merle counted at least fifty people, some of them women, no kids, but far more people than the two dozen or so silent men who had arrived on the bus that afternoon.
    Some of the men and women smoked cigarettes and some of them had small silver flasks that they shared in silence.
    Fireflies sparked and glimmered in the summer night and the city lights grew brighter. Stars glittered high above and